In recent months, Facebook has been quietly holding talks with at least half a dozen media companies about hosting their content inside Facebook rather than making users tap a link to go to an external site.

Such a plan would represent a leap of faith for news organizations accustomed to keeping their readers within their own ecosystems, as well as accumulating valuable data on them. Facebook has been trying to allay their fears, according to several of the people briefed on the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were bound by nondisclosure agreements.

Facebook intends to begin testing the new format in the next several months, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. The initial partners are expected to be The New York Times, BuzzFeed and National Geographic, although others may be added since discussions are continuing. The Times and Facebook are moving closer to a firm deal, one person said.

To make the proposal more appealing to publishers, Facebook has discussed ways for publishers to make money from advertising that would run alongside the content.

Facebook has said publicly that it wants to make the experience of consuming content online more seamless. News articles on Facebook are currently linked to the publisher’s own website, and open in a web browser, typically taking about eight seconds to load. Facebook thinks that this is too much time, especially on a mobile device, and that when it comes to catching the roving eyeballs of readers, milliseconds matter.

But as one of the article’s coauthors acknowledges, speed and seamlessness are hardly the driving factors here. The real issue is this: Facebook has far better data about individual users than any publisher has, and it wants to keep its users on Facebook. At one level, that data edge should enable it to charge higher rates to advertisers. But on another, Facebook’s audience is — by nature of its including a nontrivial share of all humanity — the definition of an undifferentiated, programmatic ad base, and premium publishers like (say) The New York Times should be able to outstrip it on a CPM basis.

Facebook controls a huge share of the traffic publishers get — 40 percent or more in many cases. Combine that with the appification of people’s online life — the retreat from the open web toward a few social-media icons on your phone’s home screen — and you start to get at the motivations here. Facebook has fallen into the role of audience gatekeeper for many publishers, and it’s offering (!) to optimize that relationship. Or at least not to screw it up:

And if Facebook pushes beyond the experimental stage and makes content hosted on the site commonplace, those who do not participate in the program could lose substantial traffic — a factor that has played into the thinking of some publishers. Their articles might load more slowly than their competitors’, and over time readers might avoid those sites.

And just as Facebook has changed its news feed to automatically play videos hosted directly on the site, giving them an advantage compared with videos hosted on YouTube, it could change the feed to give priority to articles hosted directly on its site.

I’ll have more to say about this later this week, but in general, the idea of distributed content argues that publishers should be more comfortable putting their content on platforms they don’t control. But Facebook isn’t just another platform. It’s dominant in a way no other platform is, which makes it understandable that publishers might be weighing the cost-benefit — or control-benefit — analysis differently than it does for, oh, WhatsApp or Snapchat.

The game for traditional publishers now is all about short-term/long-term tradeoffs. Of course, in the long run, you want to control the customer and advertiser relationships. But today, in 2015, Facebook controls a large share of your audience and has user data you have no hope of matching. Is it worth the tradeoff to get extra Facebook dollars today in exchange for a little of your independence tomorrow? I suspect it might be, in the narrow short term, a net positive for some publishers, especially those with no hope of charging for their content. But it’s also the sort of decision that one might look back on in a few years as the moment you got swindled.

Uh, I’m pretty sure that this is a bad idea. Great for Facebook though. Let’s think it over though (we’ll have to make some assumptions since we don’t know all the details yet):

For Facebook:

1. Facebook users will begin to have everything they need inside Facebook and generally don’t have to go anywhere else. If it catches on it’s a significant shot to Google and other ad networks that depend on ‘normal’ internet traffic.

2. Facebook can get around EU 3rd party tracking laws and web browsers that prevent 3rd party tracking because the content is hosted on their platform. They can build a bigger personal datastore then ever before.

3. Facebook can track engagement metrics and better sort out what sort of content a particular Facebook user really likes or is highly engaged with.

For the publisher:

1. No guarantee that Facebook, the “gatekeeper” will suddenly open the demand gates to favor publishers on their platform. Sure, it makes sense that they would to attract publishers, but if the platform is successful, eventually they’ll be crowded out by pure supply anyway (which is generally the case now).

2. No control over the FB platform. Ever notice why everyone loves WordPress so much? It’s because it’s extendable, open, and dramatically customizable. If Facebook is seriously considering being a “publishing platform,” in a sense, news publishers will have decreased flexibility to control the user experience. The only thing differentiating the publisher is the content itself.

Long story short, the more publishers buy into Facebook, the more FB can keep users within Facebook by favoring internally-hosted content and slowly discouraging externally hosted content. The more they do that, the more the user doesn’t really ever have to leave the platform. Then Facebook has the leverage to commoditize news content completely.

In tech, one of my favorite sayings is “Be Your Own Bitch” (Fred Wilson). Don’t wholly depend on any platform or organization, because you lose your leverage and risk being taken advantage of.

I’m sure that, if this becomes the norm, we’ll hear some success stories in the short term. But in the long term, publishers will be left scratching their heads as to how their news brands have been diminished so greatly. They didn’t see the landslide because it was so enormous, standing in the middle of it, they couldn’t tell things were moving at all.

Maybe it’ll happen anyway. Maybe Facebook will set up Medium-like publishing capability making anybody and their brother a news publisher, crowding out real, quality news. If you thought WordPress lowered the barrier to publishing and commoditized news, this is going to set it at the floor.

This is the equivalent of the point in the horror movie where the hapless victim goes into the basement despite everyone shouting at the screen for her/him not to. Don’t do it. Remember the part where FB encouraged you to spend all your time shilling for it and building up your “like/fan” base, only to then stop showing your stuff to all but a fraction of that base unless you paid them? Imagine an even-worse fate. Desert the open Web at your own extreme risk.

LizaNYC

This is a TERRIBLE idea. Agree with katzgrau. As I tweeted (@lizahoran), CPMs will drop, CTRs will drop. News sites complain about little click-through on articles — what makes them think they’ll get any click on that single ad unit that appears? If this moves forward beyond the test phase, it will be a complete SELL-OUT by the media.

BTW, I tried to post this comment on the original NYT article, but the paywall/account system has locked my account. Ridiculous UX.

How many news jobs will be eliminated over this move. We need divestitures to save the country or there won’t be any jobs or shopper.

Rodney Johnson

I completely see your point and I’m also one of those shouting “don’t go there” as we both watch our news agency’s wonder into the basement of that “haunted house” looking for a better way to get the word out.

one science news show I like, veritasium, has actually did some study into why the facebook likes do so little and why advertising on Facebook is actually ineffective at reaching people. click farms will visit and like legit advertised sites randomly with their various fake accounts even if those advertisers haven’t paid for their fake likes. to avoid automated detection the click farms will randomly like other things on Facebook so that no obvious patterns form and Facebook doesn’t seem to do anything about it. which they could do even if they can’t route out the click farms if they where to send out and check for initial engagement among those who engaged last time to see if it’s the same or less no it just picks a random group and sends it off so if it happens to grab a large bunch of click farm users your post will get the false impression of not being very popular as then most of the test group doesn’t respond; even though that’s be cause most of the test group is bots and not actual people reading the post. but of course FB doesn’t want to work around that problem because now it means you gotta sponsor more posts and that’s more money for them.

so this whole “host your content with us” thing is not going to work out well for the news guys in the long run. Hopefully they realize this before it’s to late.

daniella

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Freedom Genie

The moment that the World Wide Web was accessed by the public, it became a public service.

The “owner(s)” of websites have too much freedom to do with our data and information as they choose. Site owners don’t even need to have customer service “as FACEBOOK” has demonstrated from the beginning.

The internet should be ran “IN THE CLOUD” ONE SERVER, ONE PLACE FOR ALL YOUR INFORMATION, that “YOU” the consumer have the right to access, and to request deletion after so many years, including your phone records.

This deletion would validate that the clouds own cloud servers have expunged your data. Any violation to your rights should result in prison time, and financial penalty to the site owners, and/or companies owners.

The United States and all Nations should have one centralized location with
a record of your previous addresses that you can update, access, and
request expunged from the central cloud server.

There should be legal time limits for data retention of 12 months to 10 years for medical records, phone data, and all business transactions and dealings.

The transmission of ANY of your data should be limited for only the purpose of civil and criminal litigation by court order, and not available to the public. This includes most court cases, and records for personal privacy and safety.

(If you applied for credit in your lifetime, drive a vehicle, or vote, your address, phone number, email accounts,and social networking sites are published online for everyone to see without your consent in most circumstances.)

You then waste hours, day’s, weeks, months, and years out of your life figuring out how to get their violation of your privacy off the internet.

Our elite publish “our lives” on the net, and sale it to everyone. They ask us to pay them to remove our information from public view that they are selling. Our profiles are probably not truly being deleted when we request, and will end up in studies and publications long after we’re dead.

What would Microsoft, HP, Linux, and Dell do if the WWW was ran by one server, and know-one bought their servers???

There is a better way, but it would require our elite to put humanities interests before their own pocketbooks…

There will never be trust for any government with the way the internet & phone companies have handled information from the beginning.

The technology is fascinating, but it’s not being handled correctly. These elite need to consider the world they want their grandchildren to live within when making decisions of this magnitude for the human race. Their grandchildren may not be “the elite” so they need to consider humanity.

Boycott Facebook, “stay away from medical doctors and clinics if you can,” limit your phone calls, and take back human life, or what’s left of it.

We need to simply reform the world. We are unfortunately at the whim of what the elite want, and not so much what we want. As human beings we want to be in control of ourselves, even if we’re being watched.

Society will crumble and be no better than the Roman Empire when we’re choked from our very ability to be human. This being caused by all the technology and how it’s being so very poorly regulated.

Benton, J. (2015, Mar. 23). Facebook wants to be the new World Wide Web, and news orgs are apparently on board. Nieman Journalism Lab. Retrieved December 9, 2016, from http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/facebook-wants-to-be-the-new-world-wide-web-and-news-orgs-are-apparently-on-board/

Chicago

Benton, Joshua. "Facebook wants to be the new World Wide Web, and news orgs are apparently on board." Nieman Journalism Lab. Last modified March 23, 2015. Accessed December 9, 2016. http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/facebook-wants-to-be-the-new-world-wide-web-and-news-orgs-are-apparently-on-board/.